PIING
Reading Piing: IntelligenceThe storefront pixel
Piing: Intelligence
- How Intelligence works
- The fields it writes
- Profile refreshes and legacy units
- Preview your profiles
- Custom fields and prompts
- The storefront pixel
- Run and schedule analyses
- Where your data goes
In this guide
- What it captures
- The fields it adds
- Turn it on
- Consent and privacy
- Check it is working
- Next steps
Search or browse documentation
Piing: Intelligence 6 / 8
The storefront pixel
A lightweight theme app embed that captures browsing signals on your Shopify storefront and feeds them into richer customer profiles, with consent respected.
The storefront pixel is an optional first-party tracker that runs on the Shopify storefront. When the merchant enables it and the visitor's consent state permits the send, its browsing signals can feed four browsing-based fields. It is installed as a theme app embed, so there are no theme-code changes.
What it captures
The tracker listens for standard Shopify storefront events:
- product views
- collection views
- search queries
- cart adds
- checkout started and checkout completed
Each event is stored with its type, a timestamp, a stable anonymous visitor id, the customer id once known, and a small amount of context such as the product, collection, or search term. No names, emails, or IP addresses are stored on these rows.
The fields it adds
During an analysis run, the browsing signals are turned into customer fields and written to your Shopify metafields alongside the rest of the profile:
browse_to_buy_ratio: average product views per completed purchase.recent_browse_categories: collections browsed recently.cart_abandon_rate: the share of cart adds that did not lead to checkout.last_active_at: the date of the most recent storefront activity.
Turn it on
There are two switches: an app-level toggle and the theme embed. Both must be on.
- In Piing: Intelligence, open Settings, then Pixel and tracking, and enable the storefront tracker. This switches on server-side processing.
- In Shopify, go to Online Store, then Themes, and click Customize on your active theme.
- Open App embeds in the left sidebar, find Piing Tracker, and toggle it on. This switches on client-side collection.
- Click Save.
The tracker is then available across the storefront, subject to the Customer Privacy API and the app-level setting.
Consent and privacy
The tracker checks the Shopify Customer Privacy API before every network flush. If analytics processing is not allowed, the events are dropped client-side and are not sent. If the visitor opts in later, the tracker can begin without a page reload.
The only thing stored in the browser is one identifier, piing_anon_id, a random value that links a visitor's page views together and lets a guest checkout link back to the order. There are no third-party cookies and no cross-site tracking.
Raw pixel events use the merchant's configured retention window, with 90 days as the current default. Make sure a consent banner is active and disclose browsing analytics in the merchant privacy policy. For Intelligence the merchant is controller and Piing acts as processor. See the security page for more.
Check it is working
- Visit your storefront and browse a few products.
- Open the Pixel page in Piing: Intelligence and check the consent gate badge shows recent events.
- The recent events table should show your activity within a minute or two. Events are batched and sent every few seconds, and on page hide.
If nothing appears, the most common cause is that the Piing Tracker app embed has not been turned on in the theme editor. The pixel page includes step-by-step setup and troubleshooting.
Next steps
Related guides
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Next guide in Piing: Intelligence
Run and schedule analyses
The ways an analysis can start, what each run reports about the fields it wrote to Shopify, and how to re-sync metafields if a store's customer records look empty.
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